The Boundless Deep: Exploring Young Tennyson's Restless Years
The poet Tennyson emerged as a torn soul. He even composed a piece named The Two Voices, where two versions of the poet argued the arguments of self-destruction. Through this revealing volume, the biographer decides to concentrate on the lesser known persona of the poet.
A Pivotal Year: That Fateful Year
The year 1850 was decisive for Alfred. He unveiled the significant poem sequence In Memoriam, over which he had worked for close to twenty years. Consequently, he emerged as both celebrated and wealthy. He got married, following a long engagement. Previously, he had been living in temporary accommodations with his family members, or lodging with bachelor friends in London, or residing in solitude in a ramshackle dwelling on one of his home Lincolnshire's bleak shores. Now he acquired a home where he could receive prominent callers. He was appointed the national poet. His career as a renowned figure began.
From his teens he was striking, even magnetic. He was very tall, disheveled but handsome
Lineage Challenges
The Tennyson clan, noted Alfred, were a “black-blooded race”, indicating inclined to moods and depression. His father, a reluctant clergyman, was irate and frequently drunk. Occurred an event, the particulars of which are obscure, that led to the household servant being killed by fire in the home kitchen. One of Alfred’s brothers was placed in a lunatic asylum as a boy and stayed there for his entire existence. Another suffered from severe depression and emulated his father into drinking. A third developed an addiction to narcotics. Alfred himself suffered from bouts of overwhelming gloom and what he called “bizarre fits”. His Maud is voiced by a insane person: he must often have questioned whether he could become one in his own right.
The Compelling Figure of the Young Poet
From his teens he was commanding, verging on charismatic. He was very tall, unkempt but handsome. Before he adopted a Spanish-style cape and sombrero, he could command a room. But, having grown up crowded with his siblings – multiple siblings to an attic room – as an grown man he sought out solitude, escaping into silence when in social settings, retreating for solitary walking tours.
Deep Concerns and Upheaval of Belief
In Tennyson’s lifetime, geologists, astronomers and those early researchers who were starting to consider with Darwin about the biological beginnings, were posing frightening queries. If the story of living beings had started eons before the emergence of the human race, then how to hold that the world had been formed for mankind's advantage? “It seems impossible,” noted Tennyson, “that all of existence was simply created for us, who inhabit a insignificant sphere of a ordinary star The modern telescopes and lenses exposed areas infinitely large and beings infinitesimally small: how to hold to one’s belief, given such evidence, in a God who had formed humanity in his likeness? If ancient reptiles had become extinct, then might the humanity follow suit?
Persistent Elements: Mythical Beast and Bond
The author weaves his narrative together with dual persistent elements. The initial he presents initially – it is the concept of the mythical creature. Tennyson was a youthful scholar when he penned his poem about it. In Holmes’s opinion, with its mix of “Nordic tales, “historical science, 19th-century science fiction and the scriptural reference”, the 15-line verse establishes themes to which Tennyson would keep returning. Its sense of something immense, unspeakable and tragic, submerged inaccessible of human inquiry, foreshadows the tone of In Memoriam. It represents Tennyson’s introduction as a master of verse and as the creator of images in which terrible unknown is compressed into a few brilliantly evocative words.
The second motif is the Kraken’s opposite. Where the mythical beast represents all that is gloomy about Tennyson, his friendship with a genuine figure, Edward FitzGerald, of whom he would state “I had no truer friend”, conjures all that is loving and playful in the artist. With him, Holmes reveals a side of Tennyson seldom known. A Tennyson who, after intoning some of his most majestic lines with ““bizarre seriousness”, would abruptly chuckle heartily at his own seriousness. A Tennyson who, after calling on ““his friend FitzGerald” at home, composed a thank-you letter in rhyme depicting him in his flower bed with his pet birds resting all over him, setting their ““pink claws … on back, palm and knee”, and even on his crown. It’s an vision of delight excellently suited to FitzGerald’s significant exaltation of pleasure-seeking – his version of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. It also brings to mind the brilliant foolishness of the pair's mutual friend Edward Lear. It’s satisfying to be told that Tennyson, the melancholy celebrated individual, was also the source for Lear’s verse about the elderly gentleman with a beard in which “two owls and a fowl, four larks and a tiny creature” built their homes.
